The Internet continues to face rough times, falling victim to the nationwide heat wave, the leap second and, now, the lifting of an FBI anti-virus program. Gotta loverepetition.

At midnight, 64,000 computers in the United States and a quarter million worldwide might be forced off the Internet due to a stopgap provision provided by the federal police force that's on its last legs. The program was set up in November to allow the machines infected with the "doomsday virus" DNSChanger (or its more conspicuous title, Operation Ghost Click) to continue to be connected to the Web.

This move came after the FBI realized that if it all eliminated the virus all together, those tens of thousands of computers would have immediately lost Internet connection. So, in order to prevent that, it set up a kind of safety net that would keep the malware at bay... for the time being.

But the FBI is not unleashing SkyNet for no reason (at least, we hope not), other than the fact that the court order it received to keep the servers running has expired. By ending the safety net, the federal police force hopes to step away from the computer protection industry and pass the torch over to the providers responsible for connecting uses to the Web.

In other digital words, the FBI is putting the Internet up for security adoption.

Here's an odd item from the file-sharing legal front: The guy who ran a subtitle-file sharing website has gotten in trouble with the law -- he's had to shut down Norsub.com and pay a Norwegian court 2,500 bucks for copyright infringement, according to TorrentFreak.

This specific case provides some info about how movie and music studios treat subtitles in the U.S., too.

Since January, we have been following the developments around Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom's court proceedings and have started to seriously wonder: Will the case even get to trial?

Specifically, we're concerned with a question that raised in New Zealand back in April, when a judge said that because Dotcom was never formally served with papers by the U.S.: "I frankly don't know that we are ever going to have a trial in this matter."

Well, it looks like Dotcom has just decided to use this point to his advantage.

Earlier today, news broke that Kim Dotcom, the larger-than-life Megaupload founder known for his love of sportscars and supermodels, won a key victory in the case against him.

A judge just ruled that prosecutors had to turn over docs with evidence against him so he could defend himself against extradition demands -- a request that prosecutors had long denied, TorrentFreak notes.

Recall that the New Zealand resident is on the hook for money laundering, racketeering, and copyright infringement charges. The U.S. Department of Justice has been working since his January arrest to bring him to America for trial.

Oh, Chris Dodd. The former Democratic senator from Connecticut didn't manage to make it to the White House, but he still got people thinking about possible impeachment over that whole AIG-bonus-bailout thing.

So you might have been following CISPA, and might be aware of the SOPA/PIPA shitshow that took place in Congress earlier this year, but do you know about ACTA -- the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement?

If not, don't sweat: We'll gladly get you up to speed. That's what we're here for!

That proposed piece of law would require the removal of any comments posted on a website by an anonymous poster "unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post" if someone complains about that comment.